WE finished filming the fifth series of Clarkson’s Farm this week.
And I’m sure you’re hoping that when you get to see it next spring, it’ll be a comedic eight-part festival of cute animals, laughter and incomprehensible dry-stone walling.
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It isn’t, though. Because the last 12 months have been a conveyor belt of misery.
We began with me in hospital. After trying to open a pub while doing the harvest last year, my heart decided I really had to slow down.
But you can’t do that in farming because in the background there’s always a fox in your hen house or a man from the council with a clipboard and an opinion.
I tried to keep the stress levels to a minimum but then along came Rachel Reeves with her Budget, which would send the cost of fertiliser soaring, prevent farmers from passing their farms on to their children and cut subsidies to zero.
And then there was the weather.
I know farmers have a reputation for moaning about this but for the last couple of years they really have had problems.
In 2024, it didn’t stop raining. And in 2025, it didn’t start.
This was especially galling for me because I’d invested a ton of cash in new technology.
A robot drill. An autonomous tractor. Underground mapping to show us where the soil was good and where it wasn’t.
We had all the tech in the world, but if it doesn’t rain it won’t make a difference because nothing will grow. And nothing did.
Our barley was shorter than the grass at Wimbledon.
And then a routine test discovered that a diseased badger had wormed its way through our defences and infected one of our cows with TB.
That was confirmed this week and, as a result, even though she was pregnant with twins, she had to be destroyed.
And what happens to her after that? Burned? Dissolved in acid?
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Nope. She goes into the food chain like any other farm animal.
I don’t understand the Government’s rules on TB in this country. It looks like a mess to me.
Knackering at coalface.
Especially when I’m standing in the empty barn where my pregnant cow used to live.
A recent survey found that two thirds of British farmers are considering giving up.
The hours are brutal, the Government hates them and they earn diddly squat.
The consumer pays £1.50 for a loaf of bread. And for the wheat that was used to make it, the farmer gets 11p. He did all the work. He took all the risk. And he gets f*** all. Apart from a heart attack.
It’s likely that the brilliant guys who edit our show will find some nuggets of humour in the mix and that there’ll be some laughs in season five.
And in the relentless sunshine, the Cotswolds did look fantastic.
But at the coalface, it was knackering.
Are we carrying on? Well, we’ve sent the cameras away to give us a break from that side of things for a while.
But yup. Kaleb’s out there now in his tractor and after I’ve finished writing this, I’ll be joining him.
The show goes on.
The French take on fast food
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President Emmanuel Macron comes in for a lot of stick, which is perhaps understandable for a man who married his teacher.
But this week I listened to what he had to say about the French hospitality industry and nodded in agreement so violently my head nearly fell off.
To try to preserve France’s reputation for being the cooking capital of the world, he wants to abolish taxes on tips for staff, and reduce them for people who produce good food using French ingredients.
In short, he wants the traditional French restaurants to be able to compete on level terms with the fast-food joints that are less bothered by where food is made or what’s in it.
Meanwhile in the UK, we have a government that is determined to destroy our pubs and restaurants with stupid new taxes and an attitude to food that beggars belief.
It was Marie Antoinette, the last queen of France, who said “let them eat cake”.
Today in Britain we have Starmer and Reeves saying, “let them eat s**t”.
Cutting political insights from Countdown Carol
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In the run-up to last year’s General Election, Carol Vorderman was extremely keen that everyone should vote for Sir Starmer.
She reckoned that with a Labour government running things, the nation would be filled with smiles and sunshine.
I disagreed with her, of course. All Labour leaders in my lifetime have been useless. Wilson. Callaghan. Foot. Kinnock. Brown. Corbyn. The lot.
There was a time when Blair looked like he might be OK but then he set off to Iraq to look for a bomb that wasn’t there and it emerged he was useless too.
And there was absolutely nothing to suggest that Starmer would be any different, which he isn’t.
But Carol popped up this week to say that the main problem is PR.
What?!? You think that his attack and then retreat on pensioners was a public relations cock-up. And that his stupid Chagos deal would have been more palatable if only someone had sold the story more effectively.
And what about all the people he’s had to fire? And how he’s completely lost control of his dimwit backbenchers.
Carol concedes that Labour does need a new leader if it wants to win the next election. But I’m afraid that changing the leader won’t make any difference.
It’s the whole Labour philosophy that’s wrong.
And Andy Burnham isn’t going to fix that. So it would just be, “Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss”.
Home sec rant
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The Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, said this week that Nigel Farage is “worse than a racist”.
This struck me as odd because I thought that in the pecking order of crime, racism was at the absolute top.
The first command-ment of the new world order: Thou shall not kill or covet thy neighbour’s ox or steal but whatever thou do, thou must never be racist.
You can be a convicted murderer and still get a job. But if someone’s labelled you a racist, then that’s you cancelled for good. It’s even worse than being a climate change denier.
So what is it that Ms Mahmood now thinks trumps it?
Bordeaux collies
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A New Zealand company has launched a new kind of wine . . . for dogs.
It’s made using catnip and it’s claimed that after a glass or two, the dog starts to feel relaxed and mellow.
Sounds great.
But it’s also claimed that it stimulates appetite. And that’s not so good.
I have Labradors and they already eat absolutely everything they encounter. Their food, each other’s food, my food, table legs, cupboard doors, rugs, flies, deer, rabbits, newspapers, gear levers, shoes, the lot.
So the idea of giving them a drink that makes them want to eat more fills me with absolute dread.
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